Understanding Parameters of Command objects

[nells1]

Hi all

I'm very new to vb.net and ADO.net. I am trying to connect to a mysql database.. i've managed that Now I'm working on the Update, Delete and Insert commands. I don't want to hard code the parameters for these commands as in all the examples i can find.. ie:

selectCMD.Parameters.Add("@Country", OleDbType.VarChar, 15).Value = "UK"

Instead I would like it to read the columns from my dataset and add those as parameters. Has anyone tried to do this?? ie:

For Each Column In ds.Tables(0).Columns()
    ColumnName = Column.ColumnName.ToString
    ColumnType = Column.DataType()
    da.UpdateCommand.Parameters.Add(ColumnName, ColumnType)
    
Next Column

This code doesn't work. I need to give the parameter a OleDb.OleDbType argument (

ColumnType

) to specify the datatype of the field. The only datatype I can get out of the dataset is of type

System.Type

(

Column.DataType()

). I cannot figure out how to convert

System.Type

to

OleDb.OleDbType

.

I must be missing something... it can't be this hard. Unfortunately I can't use the built in CommandBuilder to make all these lovely things for me because i only have the standard edition of vb.net and that doesn't do all the handy stuff for non-microsoft databases. argh.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers
nells